TV REVIEW : Day of the Black Rain

The unthinkable--the A-bomb blast over Hiroshima 45 years ago today--is graphically re-created from ground level in the television movie “Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes” (tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

“Look, it’s just one B-29!” a young Japanese schoolboy shouts with relief to a classmate before a blinding, white sheet of light and a firestorm turn the boy’s world into ash.

The show’s action is focused on a group of Hiroshima citizens, a German missionary (Max Von Sydow) and two American POWs. It’s their point of view in the midst of the terror that frames the story.

The devastation and legacy of Hiroshima have become so identified with the image of the mushroom cloud and that skeletal dome where the bomb fell that it’s uncomfortable to dwell on the concrete horror. The images captured here--from black rain to lumpy, melting faces to burning bodies--are a compelling confrontation with everything we don’t want to think about.

How else do you tell the story of Hiroshima? The filmmakers--director Peter Werner, writer John McGreevey and executive producer Robert Greenwald--may risk overkill in their almost telescopic depiction of the suffering, but they also imbue the film with images of endurance and rebirth.

The closing scene, of survivors walking up to the bank of a river in the pale moonlight and floating sacrificial paper lanterns into the water, is almost beatific.

In fact, moonlight is a subtle metaphor in the movie--a bright, white wafer of a moon illuminating the blackness. At one point, a woman in a hospital, trying to prepare a Japanese doctor for a meeting with American occupation forces, suggests that he give them something like a haiku: “Now that my house has burned down, I have a much better view of the moon.”

Technically, the production, under Neil Roach’s smoky lensing and William Cruse’s vivid production design, is ambitious. An abandoned steel mill in Fontana served as the location, and the effect is a surrealistic nightmare world.

Structurally, the scenario is fragmented, weaving among several personal stories instead of focusing on one or two individuals. The effect scatters the story’s momentum but it also results in a broad gallery of subplots, featuring, among others, Mako, Pat Morita, Judd Nelson and Ben Wright (as the American airmen), Tamlyn Tomita (an Americanized daughter-in-law who plays Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw records), Brady Tsurutani (in a strong performance as a missing child) and Stan Egi.

Research was provided by the book “Hiroshima Diary” by Michihiko Hachiya, and a Hiroshima survivor, Kaz Suyeishi, served as a consultant on the set.

There have been other nuclear disaster movies, of course. Two of the best came out in 1983--ABC’s “The Day After” with Jason Robards, and the theatrical film “Testament,” which starred Jane Alexander. But they were both set in the United States and were not based on actual events. “Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes,” on the other hand, is a scorched mirror into our recent past.